Fw: Re: [Design] Ordinary is relative

[Kyle Schuant]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Lev Lafayette 

LL: Well, human versus chimp used to be a common side-show
feature.. You know, 45kg chimp, 90 kg human, chimp
picks up human throws him out of the ring...

KS: Really? Freaky. "Get your paws off me you dirty ape!" I'm with Charlton Heston on this one: "You apes can have my gun when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!" Or something like that.


LL: Relative to what however? If it's just relative to the
"campaign average", I think there is a sim problem,
especially if you start throwing in uplifted gorillas
and aliens into the mix. 

If the average human is the norm, but there's a bunch
of gorrillas in the mix as well, then the scale is
going to go wonky.

KS: You think? Is it that common to have, in the same campaign, two PCs who aren't in the same league? If Superman is a PC, will Lois Lane be a PC, too? Or is it more likely that one of them will be an NPC? Every game I can think of, the PCs are in the same league.
    By "the same league" I mean, "the weakest member of group A will be weaker than the strongest member of group B". So, in Earthdawn or Shadowrun, trolls are on average heaps stronger than humans. But the weakest troll is weaker than the strongest human. Especially if you add in a random factor, so that either the troll or the human's performance in an individual task can be much better or worse than their attribute or skill level... 
    If they're in the same league, then you don't need one scale for humans, and another for uplifted gorillas. The strongest human can wrestle the weakest gorilla, yeah? Okay, cool. So you just say, "Humans have a Strength of 1 to 10, average 5; gorillas have a Strength of 8 to 14, average 10" or something similar. 
    I can't think of any games where PCs are in different leagues on a regular basis. Sure, with "universal" rulesets you can twink it out. In GURPS you could have one character with Strength 1 and IQ 30 (normal range is 5 to 15, with 10 being "average", that is, cost zero points), and another with Strength 30 and IQ 5, they'd both be about the same point totals, and out of one another's leagues in Strength and IQ. But this just shows what I've said, no set of rules are truly universal, and you can never remove the need for the GM to say, "er, no, that would be stupid. I suggest this change to your character..." 


LL:  people don't want the know what the nth degree
is. But they also like having a rule of thumb they can
work with.

KS: Sure. The only question is how broad the brush you'll paint the character with. WoD characters get along happily with six levels of ability, or eleven if you count the attribute+skill rolls. 

    GURPS, despite all the numbers in it, in effect has about five levels of ability which come up regularly. But that's okay, since there are only four possible results: crit failure, failure, success, and crit success.

That brings up another question. Many systems have X range of _possible trait values_, and Y range of _possible performances_. X is almost always greater than Y, never less. For example, in RQ2 you have a range of possible values for a skill of 100, pretty much, since it's percentile, but you only have four possible performances: crit failure, failure, success, and crit success. WoD has the same thing, though calling crit failures "botches". Come to think of it, that four-level thing is pretty much universal in games... 
    My question is, why have a wider range of possible ability levels than you have of possible ability performances? What for? Apart from the sheer joy of number-crunching and minimaxing, it seems to me the only reason can be so that you can compare two things in the same ability band. For example, there's a system floating around where your character chooses a skill, and they're just Novice, Experienced, and Master at it. But what about when two Experienced guys duke it out? Who wins? Well, roll dice, who gets higher, wins. So it's 50/50. Most players find that unsatisfying. The guy with the MSc (Chemical Engineering) know if he's better or worse than his buddy from the same course, even though they're both Experienced. 
    More than a certain level of granularity is not practically useful. A person with 67% Fencing probably can't tell they're any better than someone with 64% Fencing. The only reason to have that level of detail - 100 possible levels - is (apart from the specific case of percentiles being easy for the average math-minded gamer to grasp) that the GM can give out small rewards without twinking out the game. If all you have is Novice, Master and Experienced, and you give out a level each game session, pretty soon the characters will be Masters of everything. But if it's a scale of 1-100, it'll take quite a while for them to get to 100% in everything...

hmmm, rambling now:)

Cheers,
Kyle
Better Mousetrap Games
home of d4-d4 and other stuff
http://www.rpgnow.com/default.php?manufacturers_id=339
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